Symbolics.com Turns 28 Years Old Today!

Not that you’ll see a world wide celebration today, but it’s worth noting that the first domain name ever registered (the one you’ve landed on) is celebrating its 28th anniversary today.

Today isn’t about me, the 2nd owner of this unique piece of Internet history, it’s about the Symbolics Computer Company who had the foresight to be the first entity on the planet to register a domain name.

The Symbolics Computer Company was based out of Massachusetts – and has since closed up shop. Back in the 80s they were pioneers in computing (from the conversations that I’ve had with employees of the former computer company) and they were really on the right track to be a major force in the industry. The Symbolics Computer Company created a line of Lisp machines, which were computers designed to run the Lisp (List Processing Language) programming language. For those interested in further history and technical data, please visit the following link: http://smbx.org/index.php/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=76 – this is a thorough history compiled by the Symbolics Company, long ago. This shows a great history of the company as well as Lisp machines.

Today, Symbolics.com remains the first (and oldest) registered domain of approximately 250,000,000 registered domain names on the Internet.

The other 4 domains that round out the original 5 registrations include:
#2 BBN.com – owned by Raytheon
#3 Think.com – owned by Oracle
#4 MCC.com – ownership under privacy protection
#5 DEC.com – owned by HP.
It’s worth noting that DEC.com was the home of the Digitial Equipent Corporation, another Massachusetts based early computer company – which was acquired by Compaq in 1998 (which merged with Hewlett Packard 4 years later).

I want to give credit where it’s due today – and that credit doesn’t belong to me. I’m just a guy who was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to acquire a neat piece of Internet history, I know that. Today, let’s give congratulations to the former employees of the Symbolics Computer Company – although the company has ceased operations, their efforts and pioneering spirit will live on for a very long time, as we remember them every 15th of March.

Thank you for visiting Symbolics.com today. I know you’re here because you read, somewhere, that today is the anniversary of the first registered domain name. I am using this unique URL for my personal blog about domain names, e-Business and startup ideas. If you choose to stick around, that would be fine with me.

Congratulations on owning a lovely neat landmark on the internet treasure it not everyday in history does someone have the opportunity to buy the first domain ever registered. Will bookmark your website and be a regular visitor

I had the pleasure of seeing the early Symbolics equipment live and in person when they brought their massive computing machines down to our Southern California RFI test facility, Certitech, in the early 80′s era onslaught of imported & domestic digital hardware. As a test tech glued to an HP spectrum analyzer, I could only marvel at the LISP code ceaselessly scrolling down their widescreen beige monitors as we applied tinfoil and ferrite cores, part of our kitchen sink/Radio Shack alchemical arsenal of FCC compliance fixes for the screaming square waves of clock pulses racing inside the PCB filled cabinets.
Aaaah, memories….

It’s the first time I read about symbolics.com and I didn’t even thought about a “first registered domain name” ever, that’s really awesome. Happy B-Day, then, and lucky you who could get such an historical domain, dude!

Symbolics.com is the first REGISTERED domain.
Nordu was used by the registry for other purposes – but yes, it’s older, but Symbolics.com is the
first domain to be registered once it became available to register names.